gurugeorge wrote:But the thing is, for the common people, having nothing to believe in isn't just some fey #firstworldproblem. It directly leads to family breakdown, crime, Idiocracy, etc., etc. Once again: smart people can just about handle it (at least the puzzle itself is an engaging Rubik's cube), but without that mental wherewithal, and without some Big Story in which you "know your place," life for most people is just a bundle of anxiety.

I think in the future people will realize that it was actually an immense act of cruelty to strip away peoples' deep beliefs the way modernity did. There were definitely huge benefits in terms of technological progress that came from looking at existence as mere mechanism (the power of quantitative analysis), but also some profound costs.

I first woke out of my dogmatic Humean slumbers last year, when I worked at the office of a Christian charity for a few months. Yes, most of the people there were "stupid" in the haughty sense we rationalists decry. Cringey cards and fridge magnets with uplifting christian messages, etc., etc., yadda yadda.

But nothing was more blindingly obvious than that they were having fun with life, much more fun than any other office job I've ever worked in.

And they were actually doing good too, they were helping out the street life late at night in various ways - helping drunks get home, helping vagrants find more detailed help, shelter, etc., etc. They hoped to bring people to Christ by example.

And that's religion at its best. I'm not saying that atheists can't do that too, but believing in something (again, even if you're only LARP-ing it) I think somehow integrates the mind, makes the human being feel at home in the universe, happy.

I think this is bang-on. We're a social animal & likely predisposed to adopt belief systems that reinforce group behavior & a satisfying position within the group. A religion that idealized a fierce individuality probably wouldn't gain traction.

I think ideas have an innate emotive resonance, independent of their intellectual content. A bit like music. The catchiness is somewhat independent of any truth contained in the ideas. Our psychology is going to intuitively gravitate toward conclusions that let us participate in the group project.

On a personal note, I don't have the ability to LARP it despite recognizing the need. I don't have the ability to do that "willing suspension of disbelief" thing & it really sucks. I feel like I'm on the outside looking in on the process & I think our species that will misfire badly if it becomes too aware of it's myths.

screwtape wrote:That's the thing; we don't need to claim truth as a property of these things, so it doesn't much matter what you pick from the Spirituality Buffet. Is it simply the practice of a ritual that works for us? Robert Sapolsky has been saying for years that half crazy people might just come up with adaptive ideas that can aid societies at certain junctures, and thus help their society and themselves. He seems to feel this explains much of religion. Maybe, maybe not—religion serves to reassure in a scary world where answers aren't obvious and it turns out that made-up answers work fairly well for some people, some of the time.

The twist is you have to actually make-believe for the medicine to work. That's why I emphasize LARP-ing.

I think this a healthy way rationalists can take advantage of the benefits of religious belief, without buying into it.

It's like, you play a videogame, and you're goofing off feeling immersed in it, part of your brain believes you're "there". This connects through to the trolling phenomenon - with the trolling "thing", the hive mind of the internet invented its own cure spontaneously.

I twigged it when I used t play EVE Online a lot. Everyone gets immersed in the game and losing your internet spaceships HURTS. But EVE is a brutal game in which you will lose the stuff you put effort into now and then. And players aren't compassionate to each other about it, precisely the opposite - they mercilessly needle you if you don't put a brave face on it and shrug it off, if you're so deeply immersed that you lost your shit.

I think that's the nub of it, the nub of the new consciousness that's developing: it's going to be about immersion in all these virtual worlds we have, but also religion is itself a virtual world, an "as if" world. Draw back and look at the longer view, it's like rationalism was, on a larger scale, the discovery of trolling re. religious immersion. But rationalism mistook itself for being, itself, a contentful kind of immersion, rather than the method of snapping out of it.

Materialism and atheism can't really form the basis of belief systems, they're autistic, about quantity and measurement, min-maxing as opposed to in-game immersion; they're wholly critical and negative, deconstructive, thought-as-trolling.

But they need something to work against, to guard against, they need actual belief systems as their compliment, responsive to this need most of us have for immersion in an over-arching belief system in which we have a place, in which we make-believe in whatever (and it may or may not be true in fact, but that's - well, not quite irrelevant, but because of the relative unfalsifiability in our current state of knowledge, at least not likely to be conclusive any time soon).

So you have this delicate dance between immersion, make-believe, really actually throwing yourself into the over-arching belief system in an experimental fashion, to the extent that it satisfies that simple, human animal part of you; and then you have rationalism to troll you, to rescue you, to pull you out if you get in too deep, too fanatical, to remind yourself that you don't actually know, you're just believing, taking a punt.

gurugeorge wrote:
I think in the future people will realize that it was actually an immense act of cruelty to strip away peoples' deep beliefs the way modernity did. There were definitely huge benefits in terms of technological progress that came from looking at existence as mere mechanism (the power of quantitative analysis), but also some profound costs.

This is pretty much Solzhenitsyn's views on the moral crimes of communism.

I think Neitzsche was speaking to the same thing when he said he who has a why can endure any how.

Yeah, absolutely, and I think this has been a constant thread throughout reactionary thinking, the best of Old Right thought. In the eyes of rationalists, it seemed at first (17th/18th centuries) that the mechanistic worldview is all benefit, not costs. But we discovered the cost in the 20th century, of making up pretty abstract pictures and trying to make the world conform by riding roughshod over nature.

It's a question of animal training. Chain up, mistreat a beast, and it becomes vicious. Entice it, cajole it, and you can tame it.

All the old religious rules were ways of taming the human animal to be sociable and able to work as a team to create great things. Religion is basically an expression of evolutionary psychological imperatives.

Religion and traditionalism has problems of course, but I think we're coming to realize that it also had great benefits.

As others have been saying, I think the key is to have that meta view - let people play, let them cluster as they will, let them be natural, but have a skeletal over-system that touches individuals lightly and protects their negative rights qua individuals (classical liberalism). Like a tether - there's some free play, but the chain pulls the beast up short when its fist approaches someone else's nose.

But instead, liberalism overshot into this totalitarian micro-management of the individual - again, creating a sort of topiary garden of humanity, trimmed thus and so according to the nerd-pleasing symmetry of equality.

Really? wrote:
I was kidding. You're right; he's done nothing and is the world's biggest doormat. And I was going to paste in some video of him, but I didn't know if people cared about a whole boring meeting.

gurugeorge wrote:But the thing is, for the common people, having nothing to believe in isn't just some fey #firstworldproblem. It directly leads to family breakdown, crime, Idiocracy, etc., etc. Once again: smart people can just about handle it (at least the puzzle itself is an engaging Rubik's cube), but without that mental wherewithal, and without some Big Story in which you "know your place," life for most people is just a bundle of anxiety.

I think in the future people will realize that it was actually an immense act of cruelty to strip away peoples' deep beliefs the way modernity did. There were definitely huge benefits in terms of technological progress that came from looking at existence as mere mechanism (the power of quantitative analysis), but also some profound costs.

I first woke out of my dogmatic Humean slumbers last year, when I worked at the office of a Christian charity for a few months. Yes, most of the people there were "stupid" in the haughty sense we rationalists decry. Cringey cards and fridge magnets with uplifting christian messages, etc., etc., yadda yadda.

But nothing was more blindingly obvious than that they were having fun with life, much more fun than any other office job I've ever worked in.

And they were actually doing good too, they were helping out the street life late at night in various ways - helping drunks get home, helping vagrants find more detailed help, shelter, etc., etc. They hoped to bring people to Christ by example.

And that's religion at its best. I'm not saying that atheists can't do that too, but believing in something (again, even if you're only LARP-ing it) I think somehow integrates the mind, makes the human being feel at home in the universe, happy.

I think this is bang-on. We're a social animal & likely predisposed to adopt belief systems that reinforce group behavior & a satisfying position within the group. A religion that idealized a fierce individuality probably wouldn't gain traction.

I think ideas have an innate emotive resonance, independent of their intellectual content. A bit like music. The catchiness is somewhat independent of any truth contained in the ideas. Our psychology is going to intuitively gravitate toward conclusions that let us participate in the group project.

On a personal note, I don't have the ability to LARP it despite recognizing the need. I don't have the ability to do that "willing suspension of disbelief" thing & it really sucks. I feel like I'm on the outside looking in on the process & I think our species that will misfire badly if it becomes too aware of it's myths.

Great points, agree. The analogy with catchiness is spot on.

On that personal note, if you can't suspend disbelief in a traditionally religious way, the thing to do is the empirical exploration of consciousness itself that Sam Harris talks about (what's been called "meditation", but there's so much baggage attached to that term that it's almost meaningless).

(Note that that was always the "secret" part of religion anyway, in many religions, the esoteric core. Mysticism is really the recognition of the blindingly obvious - science tells us all that this is all a Great Big Thing, almost a giant family; but to feel that we are this Great Big Thing, or at least a chip off the old block, is difficult to do, but it can happen - you can get little glimpses of it with everyday happiness, or walks in nature, etc., and especially with drugs, but the druggy version is unstable and fleeting, compared to the empirical playing-with-consciousness method, the core inner "high road" of most religions. The general method is roughly, to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, let the mind settle, then do various kinds of delicate explorations of consciousness from a first person point of view. It's a whole other universe of fascinating and emotionally satisfying stuff - I've not gone that deeply into it myself, but I've done enough to recognize there's a vast there there. And one of the earliest side-benefits is the same profound unburdening that most ordinarily religious people get from letting some ultimate Principle they believe in take care of the world, but in meditation it's approached in a different way, a more direct way, it's as if you find the brain switch for it in the dark, without having to go through belief.)

There seems to be something in having a carrot and a stick approach - if a religion is to persist. Without the threat of consequences for bad actions or the cycle of guilt and penance - people tend to drift away.

Anyway, such discussions bring to mind the 3rd verse of 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' (and not the Monty Python parody):

"The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate"

It's like having a state censor - someone has to decide what is best for you.

MarcusAu wrote:There seems to be something in having a carrot and a stick approach - if a religion is to persist. Without the threat of consequences for bad actions or the cycle of guilt and penance - people tend to drift away.

Anyway, such discussions bring to mind the 3rd verse of 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' (and not the Monty Python parody):

"The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate"

It's like having a state censor - someone has to decide what is best for you.

There are additional stanzas:

In August 1977,
Elvis met his fate.
But he couldn't get into heaven,
'Cause he couldn't fit through the gate.

MarcusAu wrote:There seems to be something in having a carrot and a stick approach - if a religion is to persist. Without the threat of consequences for bad actions or the cycle of guilt and penance - people tend to drift away.

Anyway, such discussions bring to mind the 3rd verse of 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' (and not the Monty Python parody):

"The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate"

It's like having a state censor - someone has to decide what is best for you.

Yeah the achilles heel of religion is the predator problem - people posing as guides, pretending to be The One, leading people down the garden path and fleecing them, or even dominating them, or letting them be dominated by others for gain. But as we've seen, the same problem exists with the pied pipers, con artists, etc., of rationalism (from Stalin to Sarkeesian).

_This problem is why the classical liberal right of exit must be maintained._ So long as you're happy co-operating with the rules and following the discipline, it's ok if you get spanked now and then; but if you're getting mistreated or conned, etc., there has to be a meta system that gives you the freedom to exit the system - but that meta system can't be too specific (that was the mistake of liberalism's overshoot, the micro-management).

Also, people have to be somewhat free to make mistakes, there's growth in that - maybe you were conned by something, but if you snap out of it, you're wiser afterwards.

gurugeorge wrote:Yeah the achilles heel of religion is the predator problem - people posing as guides, pretending to be The One, leading people down the garden path and fleecing them, or even dominating them, or letting them be dominated by others for gain.

I think it goes a bit deeper than the predator problem. The main problem with traditional religion is tribalism, which gives a fixed role to people within the tribe, whether they like it or not, and more often than not whether they're good at it or not, and which excludes to out-group from any meaningful role. This isn't just a religious problem, it can happen in non-religious environments as well, but it's not just a matter of "bad shepherds" but of lack of checks and balances to the power of a group over society.

But as we've seen, the same problem exists with the pied pipers, con artists, etc., of rationalism (from Stalin to Sarkeesian).

Absolutely. But the pied pipers and con artists need a structure to operate within. Some structures are better at dealing with infiltration and exploitation than others. Checks and balances to power are an especially good way to limit the damage caused by those who want to game the system. This is why formal, written rules which can be criticized and discussed are far better than loose guidelines, no matter how those are motivated by good intentions (like "don't be a dick" or "love your neighbor" or "fight oppression" or "serve your god").

In the case of religions this system of checks and balances is secularism. By ensuring that no specific religion is in charge secularism makes it possible for different religions to co-exist. The same thing is true for ideologies, indeed one of the reasons for the rise of the SocJus has been the muddying of waters and creation of exceptions to checks and balances in universities and other places of learning, the "soft" reaction to entryist demands like quotas, ideological purity masquerading as respecting feelings, etc.

When some ideas or positions are declared taboo, unspeakable, untouchable, something is always lost, even when those ideas are terrible. The origin of the love of censorship within the SocJus have been the Holocaust Denial laws and the various laws about prohibiting extreme right-wing symbols and speech. Those laws had good intentions, the ideas that they targeted are terrible ones and in the case of Germany I can understand the historical context behind them, but legitimizing censorship is never a good idea. The SocJus is simply trying to apply the same standards used towards Nazism towards everything they disagree with.

This goes to show that the liberal democratic checks and balances exist for a reason, and that people who mess with them, even with good intentions, just don't know what they're doing. Religious people who violate separation of church and state are wrecking the system, and need to be called out, even if they're "nice guys".

_This problem is why the classical liberal right of exit must be maintained._ So long as you're happy co-operating with the rules and following the discipline, it's ok if you get spanked now and then; but if you're getting mistreated or conned, etc., there has to be a meta system that gives you the freedom to exit the system - but that meta system can't be too specific (that was the mistake of liberalism's overshoot, the micro-management).

Also, people have to be somewhat free to make mistakes, there's growth in that - maybe you were conned by something, but if you snap out of it, you're wiser afterwards.

Oh, of course. The problems come when you realize you were being conned and want out of it. Also other people should be free to tell you you're being conned without being silenced as bigots. It's up to you to decide what and who to trust.

Really? wrote:It looks as though things are getting better at Evergreen. After the state threatened to stop giving the school money and after more than a thousand students declined to register for next semester, George took a firm stance, insisting that the student code of conduct be changed to allow for swifter, more decisive punishment.

Godspeed to those who are serving on that committee. They're making Evergreen a better place.

Wow. Just because you look like a Dalek, doesn't mean you have to act like one.

Really? wrote:It looks as though things are getting better at Evergreen. After the state threatened to stop giving the school money and after more than a thousand students declined to register for next semester, George took a firm stance, insisting that the student code of conduct be changed to allow for swifter, more decisive punishment.

Godspeed to those who are serving on that committee. They're making Evergreen a better place.

Wow. Just because you look like a Dalek, doesn't mean you have to act like one.

The Brooks article was interesting, and I say that as a person who's not a particular fan of his. I think I might check out the Dream Hoarders book he mentioned. I fall squarely in that aspirational upper middle class USAian demographic, and although my parents weren't especially well-off financially when I was growing up, they nevertheless provided many of the opportunities mentioned in the article. Many of the opportunities don't require a huge income, but rather the willingness to spend lots of time with your kids, discussing books/art/music, taking them to the library or museums, or discussing what kinds of work and knowledge various professional careers involve. Money can't buy you all of those things. I've worked in academia my entire career, and I'd say that as faculty at a medical school, I'm pretty much at ground zero for that class dynamic, and witness its manifestations every day. The US is definitely not a classless society.

Really? wrote:It looks as though things are getting better at Evergreen. After the state threatened to stop giving the school money and after more than a thousand students declined to register for next semester, George took a firm stance, insisting that the student code of conduct be changed to allow for swifter, more decisive punishment.

Godspeed to those who are serving on that committee. They're making Evergreen a better place.

Wow. Just because you look like a Dalek, doesn't mean you have to act like one.

Barbie's Boyfriend wrote:
If two Lesbian Muslims get married, they can go on a magic carpet ride for their honeymoon

I sure would like to go on a magic (sexually arousing) carpet (vagina) ride (full penetrative intercourse) with your stepsister and her Playboy bunny girlfriend, or whatever it is you say they are. My magic (average) carpet (penis this time) would certainly "rise to the occasion" lol (become engorged with blood, causing an erection).

Barbie's Boyfriend wrote:
If two Lesbian Muslims get married, they can go on a magic carpet ride for their honeymoon

I sure would like to go on a magic (sexually arousing) carpet (vagina) ride (full penetrative intercourse) with your stepsister and her Playboy bunny girlfriend, or whatever it is you say they are. My magic (average) carpet (penis this time) would certainly "rise to the occasion" lol (become engorged with blood, causing an erection).

The Playboy model was my former neighbor. Her younger half sister is still my neighbor. She is the chic on the left of my profile pic.

The Playboy model is married to a former NFL football player. Altho she used to cheat on her first husband, so you never know. Plus she was with a huge Black guy a few weeks ago who wasn't her husband. He could've been another NFLer, for all I know.

And the younger step sister has been known to have indiscriminate sex while extremely intoxicated. But since we all know that is rape...

BarnOwl wrote:The Brooks article was interesting, and I say that as a person who's not a particular fan of his. I think I might check out the Dream Hoarders book he mentioned. I fall squarely in that aspirational upper middle class USAian demographic, and although my parents weren't especially well-off financially when I was growing up, they nevertheless provided many of the opportunities mentioned in the article. Many of the opportunities don't require a huge income, but rather the willingness to spend lots of time with your kids, discussing books/art/music, taking them to the library or museums, or discussing what kinds of work and knowledge various professional careers involve. Money can't buy you all of those things. I've worked in academia my entire career, and I'd say that as faculty at a medical school, I'm pretty much at ground zero for that class dynamic, and witness its manifestations every day. The US is definitely not a classless society.

Brooks appears to merely be pointing out what was Herrnstein and Murray's central thesis in the Bell Curve, although Brooks doesn't attempt to go another level deeper to consider why the "top 20%" can, and do, do things differently than the "bottom 80%". Herrnstein and Murray consider cognitive ability to be a big factor. (high IQ strongly correlated with higher incomes (to spend on children), more intelligent children, smarter parenting, more highly educated parents, etc.) Further, these class differences are being amplified by the increasing cognitive segregation going on in our society.

BarnOwl wrote:The Brooks article was interesting, and I say that as a person who's not a particular fan of his. I think I might check out the Dream Hoarders book he mentioned. I fall squarely in that aspirational upper middle class USAian demographic, and although my parents weren't especially well-off financially when I was growing up, they nevertheless provided many of the opportunities mentioned in the article. Many of the opportunities don't require a huge income, but rather the willingness to spend lots of time with your kids, discussing books/art/music, taking them to the library or museums, or discussing what kinds of work and knowledge various professional careers involve. Money can't buy you all of those things. I've worked in academia my entire career, and I'd say that as faculty at a medical school, I'm pretty much at ground zero for that class dynamic, and witness its manifestations every day. The US is definitely not a classless society.

It is an old tradition to send your kids off to a boarding school BTW where the rigours and privations of life in such establishments tends to form lifelong bonds and frendships not to mention subsequent life long associations that will benefit said spawn for the rest of their lives.

You also make useful overseas contacts with kids who have been deposited there to make useful Canukistan contacts. For example my ex-wife attended Grenville Christian College and of course nothing she told me about the place (this is wayyyyy before the scandal(s) hit the papers) was a surprise to me having attended a similar type college myself.

So friendships are forged, and by the time you graduate, your web of contacts span more than a few areas of the globe. And as your friends usually come from influential families you have access to places and later on word-of-mouth-only opportunities that someone who attended public school will never see.

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to receive the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics, has died in the US.
The 40-year-old had breast cancer, which had spread to her bones.
Nicknamed the "Nobel Prize for Mathematics", the Fields Medal is only awarded every four years to between two and four mathematicians under 40.
It was given to Prof Mirzakhani, an Iranian, in 2014, for her work on complex geometry and dynamical systems.

The reasoned and calm speaker gets shouted down while mental patient is received with rapturous applause. This country is doomed. Also, I'm not sure why I bother watching these videos. I know they're only going to make me angry.

Lsuoma wrote:Way too much commentary form the hosts, but some revealing footage of the council meeting immediately prior to the Hugh Mungus moment.

[youtube]

[/youtube]

Footage that makes Hugh Mungus look like even more of a decent guy. It is ALWAYS the case. This is why it is IMPORTANT to make sure you are RECORDING any confrontation involving SJWs. You will need it to combat their false narrative.

The only thing that is new to me in the video of Hugh vs Zarna is that she already knew his real name, because she was there when he introduced himself to the council. That makes the interaction in the hallway more interesting.

As to the death of Maryam Mirzakhani, stay tuned for some aspect of non-linear systems to be named for her. People who work on the application of dynamical systems to neuroscience started talking about this when news of her illness came out. My bet is that attractors that work in more than two dimensions will be called "Mirzakhani Attractors" once people find at least one brain area that operates this way. Other people have suggested that the area between two attractors be called a "Mirzakhani Space."

From the according to Matthew thread about Boghossian's remark about male feminists just being in it for the pussy:

ahermit • 5 days ago
This "feeble" male feminist would like to debate Peter Boghossian at my local Dojo...I'll even waive the "controlled contact to the head" rule just for him...
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Shatterface ahermit • 4 days ago
Overcompensating much?

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ahermit MadMike • 4 days ago
I'm just laughing at Boghossian's silly stereotype. His "manly man" act is highly amusing...
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abear ahermit • a day ago
I missed the part where he threatened to use kung fu on uppity feminists. That would have been amusing.

No, what's amusing is the assumption that anyone who isn't an insecure little woman hating anti-feminist loon like himself must be an effeminate wimp. I'm not threatening anyone, I'm just laughing at what I imagine his face would look like if he ever met me in real life...I'm sure it would be quite a shock to him as I don't even remotely fit his ignorant stereotype.

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abear ahermit • 17 hours ago
Well the "debate you at my dojo" and "controlled contact to his head" remarks did sound a little like toxic masculinity.
You sure you're not a dudebro?

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Only Some Stardust abear • 11 hours ago
Is it really that toxic if it's punching a bigot in the face, though?